Many components of microelectronic and other devices are interconnected with one or more wires that are bonded to the components in some suitable manner. It is often desirable to increase the speed and efficiency with which these components are interconnected. For example, properly aligning and bonding multiple wires in accordance with the spatial arrangement of components within a device may be relatively time-consuming, machinery and labor intensive, and inefficient, particularly where large numbers of the same or similar devices are to be constructed.
As the microelectronics industry continues to rapidly develop to satisfy increasingly stringent processing and operating requirements, constructing electronic devices efficiently and accurately becomes increasingly important. In particular, techniques used to interconnect components of these devices may play significant roles in the creation or solution of problems associated with these challenges. A known technique for interconnecting components includes attaching integrated circuits or other components to a substrate and sequentially bonding individual wires to the component surfaces to interconnect the components. Despite widespread use, some reliability improvements, and high per-wire yields, such wire bonding techniques are often associated with problems such as wire corrosion, wire breakage, stress-strain mismatches and other reactions associated with interfaces between wires and component bonding pads, and interactions involving various media used for encapsulation or chip attachment.
In addition to these and other shortcomings, these wire bonding techniques have become increasingly inadequate as components become increasingly integrated and require increased precision and efficiency. For example, wire-to-wire shorting often occurs even at 2.8 mils wire-to-wire distance, which is near the practical limit for these techniques but still insufficient for an increasing number of applications. Moreover, even wire bonding techniques employing automation are often too slow, because each wire-to-component bond must be formed sequentially. Although efforts have been made to replace wire bonding techniques for electronic packaging with, for example, tape automated bonding techniques, these efforts have been unsuccessful for many applications.